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Owen Pallett sounds remarkably upbeat for a chap who suspects he's about to get fired.

The Toronto singer/composer/violin virtuoso behind Final Fantasy is in New York, where he's been scoring Rabbit Hole, the new film by John Cameron Mitchell of Hedwig and the Angry Inch infamy. It's an independent film, but it's big enough to have Nicole Kidman and Aaron Eckhart in the cast and would, thus, be a rather cool thing for Pallett – Canadian indie-rock's go-to guy for string arrangements – to add to his resumé.

Alas, he says, "I think I'm actually not going to be scoring it, despite the fact that I've scored it ... The producers are really, really happy with the work that I've done so far, but I was clear with them really early on that I had to stop working as of, like, this week because I've got to tour a record and they haven't even locked the picture yet.

"I know it would be really good for the film, but it doesn't work like that in Hollywood. You have to have 20 people happy with every nuance of every instrument and, basically, they didn't get it to me early enough for it to work with my time schedule. Which sucks, because I've been working on it for the last three months."

Hollywood's loss is the thinking music fan's gain.

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The record in question is, after all, the third album proper Pallett has recorded under the pseudonym Final Fantasy, Heartland. He's got two months of tour dates lined up in support, commencing this Tuesday – the date of the album's release – with a sold-out show at the Mod Club alongside Diamond Rings. It would be unwise to disappoint an audience that's been waiting for another Final Fantasy record since 2006's Polaris Music Prize-winning He Poos Clouds.

Except Heartland is no longer a Final Fantasy record. Although the initial pressing on Pallett's For Great Justice label has the name on the spine, the coming worldwide release on Domino Records will be an Owen Pallett album.

After years of graciously tolerating Pallett's appropriation of the name of their massively popular Final Fantasy video-game series, you see, the folks at Square/Enix games finally had a change of heart last month. Pallett's Final Fantasy had finally become too big for their lawyers to ignore.

He voluntarily retired the name, posting a statement on his website on Dec. 18 saying: "The laws of trademark infringement exist for good reason ... I feel it is in my own best interests to definitively distinguish my music from Square/Enix's games." The other records will be repackaged in time to fit the new reality.

Nevertheless, the influence of all the hours a young Owen Pallett whiled away playing Final Fantasy can still be felt on Heartland, which picks up where He Poos Clouds' Dungeons and Dragons-themed narrative left off and presents us with another fantasy quest sung in Pallett's impeccable choirboy voice and set to impossibly intricate half-orchestral, half-electronic arrangements.

This time the story finds Lewis, "a young, ultra-violent farmer," setting out across the imaginary land of Spectrum to confront – and eventually disembowel – a mysterious deity figure named Owen, who has developed a romantic obsession with him. Not really the stuff of your average pop record, but "pop" is exactly what Pallett was going for.

"I do tend to overthink stuff. Everything I do, there's always some kind of schematic to it," he says. "But I really wanted, for this record, for that not to be a millstone ...

"I was really proud of He Poos Clouds, but I kinda got a little bummed out when I was doing the interview circuit and when people would talk about it, it would always be: `So, it's a Dungeons and Dragons record ...' So, with this one, I still wanted it to have a narrative and have some things going on, but I definitely tried to think more along the lines of this was a record that was probably going to come out the same week as a new Vampire Weekend album or something. I wanted people to be able to appreciate it on the same terms."

Performing Heartland – recorded with an actual orchestra in Prague – live will be enough of a challenge that Pallett has taken the step of adding guitarist/percussionist Thomas Gill to the one-man show he's been staging with just his voice, his violin and an arsenal of loops and effects for the past half-decade.

The live show (he returns to Toronto on April 8 for a show at the Queen Elizabeth Theatre) is a constant work in progress for Pallett, as he's enough of a perfectionist that he's never totally happy with the often jaw-dropping results.

"It's never comfortable. I've never been comfortable," he laughs. "In 2004, I was basically, like: `Man, I can't sing and play violin at the same time.' Then in 2005, I was getting frustrated by the violin sound, by the fact that I could only keep stuff in the range of the violin, so I got into harmonizers and stuff like that. Then I got frustrated with the mono processing ...

"The last two years since I moved into computer looping, I've had so many things I could possibly do with my instrument that I've just been preoccupied with the songwriting. And now, I'm getting tired of digital sound so I keep asking myself, `Is there a way I can make this analog?' And the answer is, no, I can't.

"So I'm actually thinking of seamlessly moving from digital performance methods to analog performance methods in the context of a set. It's all pretty nerdy. And here I am saying, `I'm just a songwriter.'"

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